Putting Together a Hiking Food Bag
Kevin Felts 05.14.18
One of the easiest ways to keep food organized is to keep the food in a bag. This may sounds like a “Really?” statement. Yea, really.
A lot of campers, hikers, backpackers will toss their food in a backpack, head out, and then have to sift through the pack when meal time arrives. Then there is the stove, cook pot and fuel all tossed in at random.
To organize the food in my backpacks, several nylon bags of different sizes were purchased. Smaller bags for short trips, and larger bags for camping trips.
When meal time arrives, the bag is pulled out of the pack, opened, items sorted, stove set up, and a meal is cooked.
Food Bag Example:
- Stove
- Fuel
- Cook pot
- Utensils
- Lighter / matches
- Ramen noodles
- Freeze dried meal
- MRE main entree
- Desert, such as toaster pastry or tootsie roll.
Some people may include packets of salt and pepper. I use to pick up pepper packets from fast food places to keep in my food bag. Also, when going to places like Taco Bell, I may pick up some plastic utensils. However, those plastic utensils were phased out a long time ago for titanium.
The nice part is moving the food bag from backpack to backpack. Rather than going through the backpacking, sorting through them, collecting various items, just grab the food bag, and move it to the desired backpack.
Maybe set different color bags for certain stoves, or food choices.
For example:
- Blue bag – Just the bare essentials. Auch meal bars, protein bars, and a snack.
- Red bag – Stove, fuel, utensils, and one meal.
- Green bag – Stove, fuel, utensils, two pouches of freeze dried food, and desert.
Stoves such as the BRS ultralight cost less than $20. To set up two or three food bags with a stove would cost less than $60. Or, as I have done over the years, I have collected various stoves, such as the Coleman Max blended fuel stove.
The BRS goes in one bag, the Coleman Max goes in another bag and then Etekcity ultralight stove goes in yet a third bag. Since all three stoves use the same fuel, this streamlines the fuel.
From there it is a matter of grabbing the bag needed for the length of the hiking trip.
